by Joel Warner
Boulder Weekly
October 21 – 28, 2004

Tim Gale became a believer one day last January. He was prowling the Internet when he came across a video of one of the World Trade Center towers collapsing on Sept. 11, 2001. It was likely a video Gale had seen before, but this footage was in slow motion. As Gale watched the tower’s 110 floors begin to crumble, he noticed something unusual.

Right before the tower dropped into a cloud of debris, the windows on the upper levels of the towers blew outwards, one floor at a time, like clockwork. That wasn’t caused by the plane slamming into the tower or the ensuing fire, Gale told himself.

There were bombs in the World Trade Center.

“It blew my head off,” says Gale. “I started searching like crazy.”

What Gale found, in countless websites, books and films, was a vast network of information questioning the official story of what happened on Sept. 11. The 42-year-old Boulder resident was inundated with decades-old memos, foreign newspaper clippings, engineering studies and national-defense policies. And he discovered the collapse of the World Trade Center was just the beginningñhe believes he’s witnessing the collapse of the American society.

“I was being confronted with the raw fact that the U.S. government was complicit in the mass murder of its own citizens for geopolitical purposes,” says Gale. “It’s too much to bear in the confines of your mind.”

Gale began spending six to eight hours a day cross-checking evidence he found online or in publications. He wrote a 40-page paper, just to organize and process all the information. He began spouting words like “shadow government,” “false flag” and “black ops.” Then he met up with other people in the Denver-Boulder area who were asking the same questions he was, and they decided to form the Colorado chapter of the 9/11 Visibility Project. Now they’re hosting film screenings and discussions, spreading the word that there’s a whole lot more to 9/11 than we’ve been led to believe.

Gale and his local compatriots are not alone. Across the nation and the world, a growing number of people are joining what’s called the 9/11 Truth Movement. These people say there’s enough evidence or enough holes in the official recordñto suggest that government officials allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to occur, if not had a hand in them. While the movement has attracted the support of several notable figures, it also faces the risk of being associated with fringe theories of the Twilight Zone variety and has received the cold shoulder from most of the progressive press and the peace movement. Plus, there’s the fact that some say the 9/11 Truth Movement has no basis in reality whatsoever.

Gale doesn’t necessarily mind being labeled a conspiracy theorist.

“To have a conspiracy all you need is a couple facts that don’t match up,” he says, adding that in the case of 9/11, there’s more than enough questionable facts. “Until you’ve read three or four books about it, don’t tell me I’m quirky, because you have no grasp. You go into this stuff, and it’s a freaking journey.”

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